"An English manor home, an unsolved mystery, too many suspects to count -- It's the perfect holiday for romance novelist Sara Medlar. After solving two murder cases in their hometown of Lachlan, Florida, Sara Medlar, her niece Kate and their friend Jack need a change of scenery. Sara arranges for them to visit an old friend of hers in England. Upon arrival at Oxley Manor, a centuries-old estate that has been converted to a luxury hotel, Kate and Jack...

The novel "Little Dorrit", published originally between 1855 and 1857, is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the institutions of debtor's prisons-in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens'...

An unabridged edition of nineteenth-century American author Louisa May Alcott's novel about four New England sisters who come of age during the Civil War, which also includes discussion questions and activity ideas for reading groups.

The early death of a small town councilman reveals deep-rooted conflicts in the seemingly idyllic community of Pagford, which rapidly deteriorates in the face of cultural disputes, generation clashes, and a volatile election.

World War I nurse Bess Crawford promises Lieutenant Arthur Graham that she will carry his dying request to his brother, a request that is treated with skepticism, leading Bess to carry it out herself and put her own life at risk for Arthur's sake.

Obsessively watching a breakfasting couple every day to escape the pain of her losses, Rachel witnesses a shocking event that inextricably entangles her in the lives of strangers.

"Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she's been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London's fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby's...

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles—military and domestic—are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable...

Decades after World War II, Nathaniel Williams reflects on his experiences in 1945, when his parents left him and his sister in the care of a mysterious neighbor.

Exposed to fashionable society and romance--as well as clues about her mother--Lillian Haswell, brilliant daughter of a local apothecary, is torn when she is summoned back to her ailing father's bedside to save the family legacy at a time when women are forbidden to work as apothecaries and the suspicious eyes of a scholarly physician and a competing apothecary are upon her.